Contact Center: Unplugged

Asking For Help Can Cost Your Company Big Bucks

Author:  Gary Barnett

Each day, your agents receive a large number of phone calls probably focusing on a wide range of issues.  Some customers may have basic needs, such as getting their bank account balance, checking on the status of an order, or changing their addresses.  Others may have more complex issues, like over-the-phone computer tech support, that require a higher level of insight from your agents. There’s one more level of customer inquiry – the one that is so specific or difficult that it calls for additional help from someone outside of the traditional contact center boundaries who has particular expertise – typically called a subject matter expert or a knowledge worker.
 
In these instances, your agents usually follow one of two processes, both of which are time-consuming and possibly annoying for your agents, your customers and the knowledge workers:

1. Ask for assistance from a knowledge worker in order to complete the call.  In this scenario, the agent gathers background information from the customer, places the customer on-hold, calls a certain “gate” or goes down a list of people until they find an available subject matter expert.  Next the agent provides the knowledge worker with background information on the customer’s question or issue, listens to the knowledge worker’s explanation and maybe asks a few more questions to gain a full understanding of the information provided by the knowledge worker.  Finally the agent communicates the answer or information to the customer.
2. Transfer the call to a knowledge worker.  Here the agent gathers initial information from the customer and tries to resolve the customer’s issue.  This process is similar to that described above except, after speaking with the knowledge worker, the agent conferences the customer in, introduces the customer to the knowledge worker and then transfers the call to the knowledge worker for problem resolution.

According to a new study (An Evaluative Report of the Knowledge Worker’s Role in the Contact Center) conducted by Leo J. Shapiro and Associates, 10.3% of the telephone calls handled by a contact center in a typical day fall into one of the two categories I outlined above.

And, according to that same study, calls that require expertise from someone outside of the contact center last two-and-a-half minutes longer than those handled exclusively in the contact center.  If there are just under one billion interactions a day between businesses and customers around the globe the findings of this study mean that more than 95.4 million contacts a day require assistance from someone outside the contact center.  That equates to 238 million minutes each day that contact center personnel spend asking for help or transferring calls. That’s a lot of time for agents, customers, and knowledge workers alike.  And, it can equate to significant amount of money in lost productivity and customer satisfaction.

In light of these new research findings, I think it’s extremely important to think about how you’re going to streamline your customer-facing processes.  What changes are you planning to make to enable your employees and customers to more quickly and efficiently find and access the right people with the right skill sets at the right time? 

Author: Gary Barnett
Catergories: Contact Center Technology, Customer Service/Consumer Demands, Unified Communications

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